Free The Iron Maiden by Piers Anthony Page B

stump to finally stanch the bleeding. In a moment she found herself sitting on the deck with a blanket over her. She felt cold and faint, and her hand still hurt horribly.
    Hope talked, and she listened despite her pain. It seemed that Helse had been a courier for someone named QYV, pronounced Kife. The Horse concluded that she must have been carrying something valuable in her body, and he wanted to know what it was. So while the eight children sat bound on the deck, the pirates suited up and went out on the hull to fetch Helse's body back in. It was frozen grotesquely stiff, so they waited while it slowly thawed, because they did not want to destroy whatever it was inside her.
    It was an agonizingly long wait, several days, and all that time the pirates kept the children bound and guarded, released only singly to use the head. They allowed Spirit to rummage ineffectively through her own belongings for better bandaging material for her hand. The tacit deal was that then she would stop moaning so much. There was nothing suitable, so she had to settle for soft undergarments wrapped voluminously around and anchored clumsily with elastic. At least it stifled the bleeding, and she did stop her noise.
    Actually she wasn't hurting quite as much as she let on. She had realized almost immediately that the pirates were keeping all of them alive mainly so that they would have plenty of children to torture if they needed to make Hope talk some more. Once they had what they wanted, they would probably either kill the children, or leave them in the bubble without the drive, so that they would inevitably die when their food and air ran out. They were doomed--unless they found some way to overcome the pirates. That was why, in the guise of clumsiness, she fetched her finger whip, and the tiniest of weapons: a knife fashioned from an ancient-style razor blade. It had been one of the weapons they had used in Stage Two.
    She hid it with in the bandage, next to the gore of the stump. It was unlikely to be discovered there.
    But she had no chance to use it, because a pirate was always watching, day and night. One even watched while she pissed in the head, licking his lips; there was no privacy at all. They were children, but she was pretty sure they would get raped before the pirates departed. Not all of the men would be as finicky about age as the Horse. They were just waiting for his word that the mission was done; then they would grab the particular children they had decided on and do it. Spirit had a fair notion which pirate wanted which child for what; they were hardly subtle about their glances. When it was the Horses's turn to return to their ship and sleep, two pirates would stand guard duty in the bubble, and sometimes they talked, not caring who heard. “That one with the finger--she's got half a breast,” one said, staring at Spirit. “Got tight little pussy too, I'll bet.” They even played a series of games of dice to determine which one of them would get the first dip, as they put it. Spirit pretended she didn't hear or didn't understand, and so did the other children. They had all learned the pretense of innocence, but all knew exactly what the pirates were talking about, having seen it happen before.
    Meanwhile in the long hours they sat while Helse's body thawed, and the deathly stench slowly intensified, Spirit reflected on her life and situation, trying to understand why it had come to this pass. She concluded that she had brought it on herself: she had let her brother put his digit into her, so she had had one of her own digits cut off. God's punishment, a tooth for a tooth. If she ever did it again, she would pay again. It was not a lesson she was ever likely to forget. It might be that the whole second appearance of the Horse was to effect that punishment. She had brought it on them all.
    But they had not yet been killed. That meant that God was giving her time not only to repent, but perhaps to redeem herself. Maybe she